Why do we go to church? That seems to be the question each September as the summer comes to an end, and we go back to a normal schedule. I think there are a lot of reasons to go to church; it’s a social place with lots of activities. The music isn’t half bad, and the coffee is warm with potlucks that invite good laughter as we eat decent potato salad. We get sent into a place where time seems to stay still, and tradition, reason, and Scripture play along with our experience of human emotions and concepts. My first church experience was at Chapel Place Presbyterian Church; there, I was everyone’s child and grandchild. My parents would walk through the doors and hand me off to the closest Giddo or Teta (grandparents), and wouldn’t see me until they were walking out of those doors. I was truly loved; I felt community, a blessed feeling, a place where I was known and was seen — a place where I belonged. That’s why I go to church; it’s a place where I belong. Belonging comes from the people — those who sit next to us in the pews, those who smile at us or get out of their seats during the sign of peace, the ones who speak the same words and laugh at the same corny jokes. Belonging creates equality, becoming equal with those amongst us as we explore our faith together. Equality invites questions to enter the room. Good questions to give pondering a chance. Questions that are deep enough for a scholar to drown in, but shallow enough for an infant to be safe from drowning. Belonging doesn’t require us to have those answers; it doesn’t require us to be ready; rather, it invites us to be with those loved by Christ.
Thomas R. Kelly, a Quaker theologian, beautifully states:
“In the Fellowship,¹ cultural and educational and national and racial differences are levelled. Unlettered men are at ease with the truly humbled scholar who lives in the Life, and the scholar listens with joy and openness to the precious experiences of God’s dealings with the workingman. We find men with chilly theologies but with glowing hearts. We overleap the boundaries of church membership and find Lutherans and Roman Catholics, Jews and Christians, within the Fellowship. We re-read the poets and saints, and the Fellowship is enlarged. With urgent hunger we read the Scriptures, with no thought of pious exercise, but in order to find more friends for the soul. We brush past our historical learning in the Scriptures, to seize upon those writers who lived in the Center, in the Life and in the Power. Time telescopes and vanishes, centuries and creeds are overleaped. The incident of death puts no boundaries to the Blessed Community, wherein men lived and loved and worked and prayed in that Life and Power which gave forth the Scriptures. And we wonder and grieve at the overwhelming heady preoccupation of religious people with problems, unless they have first come into the Fellowship of the Light.”²
Kelly’s words, though originally written in the 1940s,³ speak the same in our modern times. The Fellowship, those living in the light within, is the center point to how community exists. It’s one of the reasons I am a part of the Church; I am made equal with those who sit in the pews. We sing songs of praise as though we were one voice. We, though completely unique and different, enter into a relationship that goes beyond our
differences. Our educational levels may vary, but our appreciation of the Gospels and the Good News that is preached on those faithful Sundays make us one. Our experiences, though different, get stitched into the tapestry of God’s love for all creation. As we come to the table, our sins, blessings, fears, doubts, and beliefs muddle together and we walk hand in hand, standing, kneeling, sitting as one body, consuming the elements and being made anew. At the table, we find belonging and in the beauty of our belonging; we are not equal in our gifts, skills, and talents, but in them we lift one another up, delighting in one another.4 Just as St. Paul states, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”5
In the Church, we are not required to be anything but ourselves. We come as we are and are welcomed by people as they are. Further, as we change and grow, we are still welcomed openly by the disciples of Christ. Perfection is for wishful thinkers. We experience grace and mercy, and our holiness — which comes from God — brings us back to childhood, where we first experienced belonging.
Unfortunately, throughout our history, the Church has not always been a place of belonging, and we have lost our childlike ways. We have killed, scorned, and ruined people in the name of Jesus Christ. We have made people feel unwanted, casting out those who do not sound, look, or resemble what we believe a good Christian is or was. And if you are reading this and this was your experience with the Church, I’m deeply
sorry; it was wrong for us to do such things. We forgot where we came from. We forgot the focal point of our belonging, that we were once strangers being welcomed by a loving God. We forgot what it meant to be like a child, welcoming all to our groups, and forgot our Father’s voice saying, “You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”6 We forgot what it was like when we didn’t know anything, but I think we’re remembering. We’re remembering to look toward reconciliation and take steps to make sure that all belong. Listening to voices outside of our own, participating in different cultures, understandings, or visions. Together, we move towards equality, equity, diversity; we move towards belonging.
That’s why I go to church. It invites me to step back from the busyness of life and be myself. It’s a place where I find people who are nothing like me, yet I become equal with them. It’s the place where I went from stranger to friend. It’s a place where I belong.
- Kelly describes this fellowship as “the relation that is so surprising and so rich that we despair of finding a word glorious enough and weighty enough to name it. Some men and women whom we have never known before, or whom we have noticed only as a dim background for our more special friendships, suddenly loom large, step forward in our attention as men and women whom we now know to the depths. Our earlier conversations with these persons may have been few and brief, but now we know them, as it were, from within” (Thomas R. Kelly, Testament of Devotion, “A Blessed Community,” (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1992), 51-52.).
- Thomas R. Kelly, Testament of Devotion, “A Blessed Community,” (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1992), 55–56.
- This is why he uses male-dominated pronouns and refers to humanity as men.
- Please stop asking me to join the choir. I really can’t sing well, and it would be unkind to those who have to listen to me. My strengths are in other things, and that’s a good thing!
- 1 Corinthians 12:12-13
- Deuteronomy 10:19
